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4 Comments to “On London”

I think Seymour is definitely on to something. Let me say first, however, that I think it’s obvious to everyone except people like Seymour what the motives of the rioters are: it’s simply to take advantage of the mayhem in order to steal, burn things and bash a policeman if they get a chance. So I think it’s false to claim that the majority of rioters are intentionally acting for anything like political reasons. Nevertheless, these events have set up a confrontation between the government, who is furiously trying to deny any political or even sociological basis for the riots (“pure criminality”), and people like Seymour who seek to posit an emerging political subjectivity as the agency behind the riots. On the basis of this disagreement over how to interpret events we may well find that perceptions concerning the “disaffected youth” change, and that groups will step forward to claim the subjectivity which is currently being disputed as their own. And that would definitely be a good thing.

It’s all food for thought, which is why I’m posting links, not commentary. But I *am* really cautious about saying that *anything* is obvious about what the motives of the rioters are. No one really knows why a lot of the London rioters are rioting. Some of them we can speculate responsibility about, but after that point, we’re just projecting our own desires and expectations on a mass of people who are far too diverse to be simplistically summarized.

Which is why I think it’s really important to not do the thing where you confuse the scales of the individual with the scale of the society. Individuals make individual choices about whether or not to riot for reasons that make sense to them: fuck the police, I want those ipads, we are here, hey this is fun, the revolution is now, etc. Whatever it is, it’s always a coherent set of rational processes from each individual’s perspective, a choice that gets made because of the individual’s particular inclinations, fears, and desires (or at least retroactively rationalized in those terms). It may be a motivation you sympathize with or it may not be one you do not sympathize with, but each individual will have a different one.

But a riot doesn’t have a psychology because it’s an aggregate function of a multitude of individuals; a riot can’t make sense or have a motivation because a riot isn’t a rational human being. I tend to sympathize, in other words, to the perspective that a riot “happens” not for a coherent reason (as an individual’s actions “happen”), but because all the reasons for it not to happen have failed, which is a very different form of problem: a riot happens because a single situation (London, now) has evolved into a state where a critical mass of individuals reach the same conclusion, EVEN IF they do it for different reasons.

That said, you’re absolutely right to highlight the fact that an event’s meaning changes as it goes on; the key thing will be what people say and think about the rioters from now on, not what the original motivations might have been.

All good points. I wonder though whether a lot of these kids aren’t simply playing the role that society expects them to play. Pretty much since they were born, many of them have been conditioned to think of themselves as thuggish, unemployable, unteachable, etc. A whole bureaucracy exists solely to study them and manage their lives, because they are assumed to be incapable of articulating let alone solving their own problems.

I’m prepared to concede that what we have here is a “critical mass of individuals reach[ing] the same conclusion… for different reasons” – but surely it’s no accident that the “conclusion” reached is entirely consistent with society’s attitudes and prejudices towards these individuals as a group. That’s the point I was trying to get at with by imprecise reference to motivations. In noting that their behaviour appears to others as entirely predictable and obvious, I’m rejecting Seymour’s romanticised vision of its political efficacy. I would argue that the only way out of the vicious circle is if those denied the capacity to speak for themselves can find a collective means of expression that isn’t so easily dismissed as criminal or senseless. And that will almost certainly require appropriating, in their own fashion, previous traditions of emancipation; and yes, it is people like Seymour who help keep those traditions alive.

Agreed, I think. A propos of that, I like the way Potlatch urges, from my second link post, that we:

“remember the Hegelian distinction between ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’. In themselves, these riots may indeed be about inequality: the concentration of wealth and power may simply have become too unwieldy, regardless of what the rioters think is going on. But for themselves, they are about power, hedonism, consumption and sovereignty of the ego.”